You stated that AI will never be able to read "Anna Karenina" for you. Nor will it be as good a crimefighting tool as a good book. In 1886, while tracking and capturing thieves in Dakota Territory, Theodore Roosevelt hauled along a copy of Tolstoy's tome, which he read to his captives as he marched them back to justice.
Interesting that the viral list-makers are not academics. We academics make lists all the time for specific material reasons -- lists for a course syllabus, lists for students to read to pass comprehensive exams, list for students to consider for a thesis or dissertation. Then there are the lists inside of lists, like nesting dolls -- read this book but if you're really going to understand this book you need to read these books, etc.
So I am always glad to see non-academic lists because they aren't purposeful but delightfully whimsical or thoughtful (@patrickc) or performative, or tart commentaries (like @pmarca).
Yes, more people should make lists! Lex Fridman's list was good too.
Related but tangental: I used to find it much easier to get post-grad reading lists (or even undergrad reading lists) online from Oxford/Cambridge/ etc a decade and more ago. Now it is increasingly difficult to find them. (St. Johns is good.) I think this is a mistake. It's a marketing net-positive to share lectures online, run MOOCs etc. I like lists, and I wish more institutions made theirs available.
I believe most people overlook the practical side of the canon. Given that language governs how we learn and understand the world, we must have a baseline — and that is the canon. A canon provides a framework of references into the human experience for the community who reads it. Without it, we talk past each other with misunderstanding and confusion. I will never forget the time when I made a reference to Homer and somewhat had thought I was talking about Homer Simpson. There are many canons, and if you want to understand and participate in a certain community, then you must read their canon. This is not new. The biological constraints of the human brain require this. As of yet, tech really does not have an answer to this. Still, one must do the work to reach any level of understanding. I do believe that Bloom understood this too. He was not saying there is only one canon or that you cannot add to the western canon, but you must first read the canon as it has come up to you through time. That is our baseline from which we can jump off or add. The weight of the canon is inescapable because one brings the other into being. You cannot eliminate one side of the old/new binary. For that is called ignorance.
I had a short correspondence with Bloom back in 2014. I had written an essay on the short story "Blackberry Winter" by Robert Penn Warren. Bloom and Warren had been friends. A friend of mine who had known Bloom asked if he could send it to him. Shocked that he thought he even had to ask me, I exchanged emails with Harold Bloom. Anyone who knew Bloom knows that he was a luddite. He never used a computer. His wife was his conduit for any communication via technology.
Until we are able to medically alter how the human brain inputs and processes information, we are somewhat safe from AI. But don't relax too much, for that is certain to come. Until then, get to reading that canon.
Great article Henry. I am a fan of Bloom and I think his discussions on canon are important. I tend to favor the idea that we each should develop our own canon rather than there being one overarching canon for all. However, we are all in agreement that reading great books is essential and becoming more so with time.
The world described in Upton Sinclair's 'The Jungle' never really disappeared. It lives on in many guises unmoved and unshaken by expose or investigation. Yesterdays meatpacking barons live on in Silicon Valley's technofeudals.
That byline holds. I thought you were going to answer it. The article is great, it really points out some burgeoning areas although it's not a panoramic of things happening but it's great food for thought. Granted I don't think individualism matters.
Christian canon is coming next. The western canon can be depleted. Canons are derivative of literary movements and there's none for the west in itself.
We know, as Mill could not have known, that the time in which he wrote was followed by the greatest explosion of entrepreneurship and civilizational growth the world has ever seen: the technological transformation of the world in roughly 1867-1914 (chronicled by Vaclav Smil among others) remains unparalleled. And the aesthetic flowering of that time was also extraordinary -- Brahms and Mahler, Impressionism and Art Nouveau. No decadence there!
Silicon Valley types today want desperately to believe that they (we?) are bringing another such time into being, that AI or anti aging or whatever will shake us out of our decadence and transform the world again. I still think we could do more to study the cultural roots of that earlier transformation. Why didn't things just keep getting more decadent as Mill feared they would?
The question of why some technology (indoor theatre, mass printing, celluloid, certain instruments) leads to artistic flourishing, while some does not (television!) is under theorised, in my view.
Note the time framing. 1914? Decadence? Time for a bit of research. Here’s a hint: something big started that year. In aesthetic terms it certainly helped the development of such charming movements as dada and surrealism. Kind of gave fascism and communism a big boost too.
Fair enough -I’ll try to explain myself. I was responding to Nicholas W. I agree that the late Victorian era was unparalleled, and I think a strong case can be made that the innovations and inventions of that time were more consequential than many that have followed since. All the more tragic then, that WWI turned them to destructive ends on a massive scale. Our material miracles did not diminish humanity’s darker potential - quite the opposite. That’s a lesson I think Bloom would teach. Excessive fascination with technological development requires serious tempering. We got to the moon - yay! I watched it on the tube. (Funny how the vibrant pioneers colonies of space-suited miners, technicians, etc. never actually materialized afterwards though.) But who really wants to live on Mars? Though his cranky sentiments have probably rendered him completely toxic, Edward Abbey has an observation along these lines. Gimme a minute to look it up…
Sorry about that first rambling response. I do wonder what you think about Postcritique? Seems the pendulum has swung just as problematically the other way. Even though Bloom called theoretical approaches “schools of resentment,” I do believe he understood deep down that theory is inextricable from practice by any other name. The political in literature is implicit. This creates an open door for multiple approaches — resisting reductive meanings. To be otherwise is to be didactic propaganda. There has always been a fine line between them. I am optimistic about AI. I do believe that at some point we will evolve into a post-human world, it doesn’t necessarily mean that will be bad. You accurately point out that depends on those folks in Silicon Valley.
Harold Bloom's writing was unintelligible. Pick any paragraph and try to figure it out. Hogwash, all the way. He was also a cad. Just read Naomi Wolf's experience with him while a student at Yale.
Accusations persist yes. And he has moments of obscurity, but overall The Western Canon is a very good book. His writing on influence esp the Milton section of A Map of Misreading is excellent. The romantics book is good as is the bible book. The Shakespeare book has some excellent material too.
"Poetry essentially is figurative language, concentrated so that its form is both expressive and evocative. Figuration is a departure from the literal, and the form of a great poem itself can be a trope ("turning") or figure. A common dictionary equivalent for "figurative language" is "metaphorical," but a metaphor actually is a highly specific figure, or turning from the literal."
--From his, The Best Poems of the English Language.
Claptrap! Obscure, roundabout and meaningless. This is the kind of writing that people who can not write cogently employ to give seeming meaning to nonsense.
It is meaningless babble. Here is another. "Hardy, like the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, believed that the rapacious Will to Live subsumed. all individual will. Our desires are repetitious, and not openings to permanent love, nor to possibilities of transcendence. Renunciation, negativity, tragedies of circumstance: these are the essence of Hardy." I could go on very easily with dozens of examples of this kind of nonsense.
Let me explain. In the first paragraph I selected, Bloom does not state what poetry is, while claiming to state what it is by focusing on only one minor aspect of some poetry. He doesn't call attention to form, meter, rhyme, the music when a poem is read loud, etc. It is, to him, about sentiment only. Well, fiction is also expressive and evocative -- how is poetry any different? (A leopard is also a cat, but it doesn't tell one about their vastly different natures.)
What about poetry that is often quite literal? Byron was often literal, for example -- did he not write some of the greatest poems in the English language? And, by the way, what is "concentrated?" Does he mean not conversational? A well-written essay is edited to cut the extraneous, as well. How do these differ? Do they? What sets an essay apart from a poem?
The reason his discussion of poetry is meaningless, is that he, like many of the post-modernist generation of literary academics, were possessed by the unshakeable conviction that anything could be a poem. No meter? OK! No rhyme? Fine! No music? Bring it on! No beauty in the language? Dandy! Ugly subject matter? Even better!
Even if it is abstruse to the point of meaninglessness. Like the non-sensical "poetry" of Wallace Stevens (I have read through everything of his that has been published, about 1/4 of which was intelligible); or unmetered, unrhymed and overripe like Whitman's (all of whose work I have read, holding my nose, though some lines are poesical) -- both of whom Bloom, in his own words, adored. He loved them both as a child, as he once wrote. I believe that he attached his own sentiment to the sentiments he believed he had read; they were ultimately personal to him. Of course, he was exceptionally well-read, but all scholars of that age I knew were.
Bloom hated the poetry of Ezra Pound and that of Poe (with which sentiment I heartily agree), but not because it wasn't "poetry" to Bloom (Poe's certainly obeyed meter and rhyme), but because it was bad (ham-fisted, I think he called it). To Bloom, at least when it came to poetry, anything goes -- figurative evocative concentrated language without anything more. That's like describing a car by its wheels.
And this is why it is an important topic to discuss. It is, in fact, the central problem with all of the arts in the West since about 1900, and one sees it reflected here in miniature, in Bloom's writing about poetry.
If it can be anything, it's no thing at all. Just read what is passed off as poetry these days and you'll see non-poetry everywhere -- and a species what I call "anti-poetry" as well, which is intentionally, even sadistically apoetic. It's not poetry, it's something else. But Bloom did not see that, for reasons one can't know. That is why I say, don't bother to read him, or, if one does, always question his literary judgment.
To be fair, assuming Naomi is telling the truth, there was not the usual pile-on from hundreds of other women. It does appear to be very limited. Not excusing it, but no one is perfect. He did have one of the most arrogant pick-up lines of all: "You have the aura of election upon you." 😂
You stated that AI will never be able to read "Anna Karenina" for you. Nor will it be as good a crimefighting tool as a good book. In 1886, while tracking and capturing thieves in Dakota Territory, Theodore Roosevelt hauled along a copy of Tolstoy's tome, which he read to his captives as he marched them back to justice.
Interesting that the viral list-makers are not academics. We academics make lists all the time for specific material reasons -- lists for a course syllabus, lists for students to read to pass comprehensive exams, list for students to consider for a thesis or dissertation. Then there are the lists inside of lists, like nesting dolls -- read this book but if you're really going to understand this book you need to read these books, etc.
So I am always glad to see non-academic lists because they aren't purposeful but delightfully whimsical or thoughtful (@patrickc) or performative, or tart commentaries (like @pmarca).
Yes, more people should make lists! Lex Fridman's list was good too.
Related but tangental: I used to find it much easier to get post-grad reading lists (or even undergrad reading lists) online from Oxford/Cambridge/ etc a decade and more ago. Now it is increasingly difficult to find them. (St. Johns is good.) I think this is a mistake. It's a marketing net-positive to share lectures online, run MOOCs etc. I like lists, and I wish more institutions made theirs available.
I believe most people overlook the practical side of the canon. Given that language governs how we learn and understand the world, we must have a baseline — and that is the canon. A canon provides a framework of references into the human experience for the community who reads it. Without it, we talk past each other with misunderstanding and confusion. I will never forget the time when I made a reference to Homer and somewhat had thought I was talking about Homer Simpson. There are many canons, and if you want to understand and participate in a certain community, then you must read their canon. This is not new. The biological constraints of the human brain require this. As of yet, tech really does not have an answer to this. Still, one must do the work to reach any level of understanding. I do believe that Bloom understood this too. He was not saying there is only one canon or that you cannot add to the western canon, but you must first read the canon as it has come up to you through time. That is our baseline from which we can jump off or add. The weight of the canon is inescapable because one brings the other into being. You cannot eliminate one side of the old/new binary. For that is called ignorance.
I had a short correspondence with Bloom back in 2014. I had written an essay on the short story "Blackberry Winter" by Robert Penn Warren. Bloom and Warren had been friends. A friend of mine who had known Bloom asked if he could send it to him. Shocked that he thought he even had to ask me, I exchanged emails with Harold Bloom. Anyone who knew Bloom knows that he was a luddite. He never used a computer. His wife was his conduit for any communication via technology.
Until we are able to medically alter how the human brain inputs and processes information, we are somewhat safe from AI. But don't relax too much, for that is certain to come. Until then, get to reading that canon.
Great article Henry. I am a fan of Bloom and I think his discussions on canon are important. I tend to favor the idea that we each should develop our own canon rather than there being one overarching canon for all. However, we are all in agreement that reading great books is essential and becoming more so with time.
Thanks!
This is an epic read.
Thanks :)
The world described in Upton Sinclair's 'The Jungle' never really disappeared. It lives on in many guises unmoved and unshaken by expose or investigation. Yesterdays meatpacking barons live on in Silicon Valley's technofeudals.
That byline holds. I thought you were going to answer it. The article is great, it really points out some burgeoning areas although it's not a panoramic of things happening but it's great food for thought. Granted I don't think individualism matters.
Christian canon is coming next. The western canon can be depleted. Canons are derivative of literary movements and there's none for the west in itself.
Love when you talk Harold Bloom!
:)
We know, as Mill could not have known, that the time in which he wrote was followed by the greatest explosion of entrepreneurship and civilizational growth the world has ever seen: the technological transformation of the world in roughly 1867-1914 (chronicled by Vaclav Smil among others) remains unparalleled. And the aesthetic flowering of that time was also extraordinary -- Brahms and Mahler, Impressionism and Art Nouveau. No decadence there!
Silicon Valley types today want desperately to believe that they (we?) are bringing another such time into being, that AI or anti aging or whatever will shake us out of our decadence and transform the world again. I still think we could do more to study the cultural roots of that earlier transformation. Why didn't things just keep getting more decadent as Mill feared they would?
The question of why some technology (indoor theatre, mass printing, celluloid, certain instruments) leads to artistic flourishing, while some does not (television!) is under theorised, in my view.
Note the time framing. 1914? Decadence? Time for a bit of research. Here’s a hint: something big started that year. In aesthetic terms it certainly helped the development of such charming movements as dada and surrealism. Kind of gave fascism and communism a big boost too.
I don't know what point you are trying to make!
Fair enough -I’ll try to explain myself. I was responding to Nicholas W. I agree that the late Victorian era was unparalleled, and I think a strong case can be made that the innovations and inventions of that time were more consequential than many that have followed since. All the more tragic then, that WWI turned them to destructive ends on a massive scale. Our material miracles did not diminish humanity’s darker potential - quite the opposite. That’s a lesson I think Bloom would teach. Excessive fascination with technological development requires serious tempering. We got to the moon - yay! I watched it on the tube. (Funny how the vibrant pioneers colonies of space-suited miners, technicians, etc. never actually materialized afterwards though.) But who really wants to live on Mars? Though his cranky sentiments have probably rendered him completely toxic, Edward Abbey has an observation along these lines. Gimme a minute to look it up…
Sorry about that first rambling response. I do wonder what you think about Postcritique? Seems the pendulum has swung just as problematically the other way. Even though Bloom called theoretical approaches “schools of resentment,” I do believe he understood deep down that theory is inextricable from practice by any other name. The political in literature is implicit. This creates an open door for multiple approaches — resisting reductive meanings. To be otherwise is to be didactic propaganda. There has always been a fine line between them. I am optimistic about AI. I do believe that at some point we will evolve into a post-human world, it doesn’t necessarily mean that will be bad. You accurately point out that depends on those folks in Silicon Valley.
Not sure I have a view tbh
Harold Bloom's writing was unintelligible. Pick any paragraph and try to figure it out. Hogwash, all the way. He was also a cad. Just read Naomi Wolf's experience with him while a student at Yale.
Accusations persist yes. And he has moments of obscurity, but overall The Western Canon is a very good book. His writing on influence esp the Milton section of A Map of Misreading is excellent. The romantics book is good as is the bible book. The Shakespeare book has some excellent material too.
Just read this paragraph, chosen at random.
"Poetry essentially is figurative language, concentrated so that its form is both expressive and evocative. Figuration is a departure from the literal, and the form of a great poem itself can be a trope ("turning") or figure. A common dictionary equivalent for "figurative language" is "metaphorical," but a metaphor actually is a highly specific figure, or turning from the literal."
--From his, The Best Poems of the English Language.
Claptrap! Obscure, roundabout and meaningless. This is the kind of writing that people who can not write cogently employ to give seeming meaning to nonsense.
It makes complete sense and isn’t saying anything remotely contentious.
It is meaningless babble. Here is another. "Hardy, like the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, believed that the rapacious Will to Live subsumed. all individual will. Our desires are repetitious, and not openings to permanent love, nor to possibilities of transcendence. Renunciation, negativity, tragedies of circumstance: these are the essence of Hardy." I could go on very easily with dozens of examples of this kind of nonsense.
I don't know what doesn't make sense to you, or why you care this much, but I think it's quite obviously coherent.
Let me explain. In the first paragraph I selected, Bloom does not state what poetry is, while claiming to state what it is by focusing on only one minor aspect of some poetry. He doesn't call attention to form, meter, rhyme, the music when a poem is read loud, etc. It is, to him, about sentiment only. Well, fiction is also expressive and evocative -- how is poetry any different? (A leopard is also a cat, but it doesn't tell one about their vastly different natures.)
What about poetry that is often quite literal? Byron was often literal, for example -- did he not write some of the greatest poems in the English language? And, by the way, what is "concentrated?" Does he mean not conversational? A well-written essay is edited to cut the extraneous, as well. How do these differ? Do they? What sets an essay apart from a poem?
The reason his discussion of poetry is meaningless, is that he, like many of the post-modernist generation of literary academics, were possessed by the unshakeable conviction that anything could be a poem. No meter? OK! No rhyme? Fine! No music? Bring it on! No beauty in the language? Dandy! Ugly subject matter? Even better!
Even if it is abstruse to the point of meaninglessness. Like the non-sensical "poetry" of Wallace Stevens (I have read through everything of his that has been published, about 1/4 of which was intelligible); or unmetered, unrhymed and overripe like Whitman's (all of whose work I have read, holding my nose, though some lines are poesical) -- both of whom Bloom, in his own words, adored. He loved them both as a child, as he once wrote. I believe that he attached his own sentiment to the sentiments he believed he had read; they were ultimately personal to him. Of course, he was exceptionally well-read, but all scholars of that age I knew were.
Bloom hated the poetry of Ezra Pound and that of Poe (with which sentiment I heartily agree), but not because it wasn't "poetry" to Bloom (Poe's certainly obeyed meter and rhyme), but because it was bad (ham-fisted, I think he called it). To Bloom, at least when it came to poetry, anything goes -- figurative evocative concentrated language without anything more. That's like describing a car by its wheels.
And this is why it is an important topic to discuss. It is, in fact, the central problem with all of the arts in the West since about 1900, and one sees it reflected here in miniature, in Bloom's writing about poetry.
If it can be anything, it's no thing at all. Just read what is passed off as poetry these days and you'll see non-poetry everywhere -- and a species what I call "anti-poetry" as well, which is intentionally, even sadistically apoetic. It's not poetry, it's something else. But Bloom did not see that, for reasons one can't know. That is why I say, don't bother to read him, or, if one does, always question his literary judgment.
I welcome your thoughts on the matter!
To be fair, assuming Naomi is telling the truth, there was not the usual pile-on from hundreds of other women. It does appear to be very limited. Not excusing it, but no one is perfect. He did have one of the most arrogant pick-up lines of all: "You have the aura of election upon you." 😂